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Harddisk shows icon, but no contents

I have an external Quadra D2 hd that connects through usb. It used to work allright, but it has been off for a year. Now when I start it up It shows (in W10) an icon with a drive letter, but no bar that shows the available space. Clicking on it makes Explorer hang. When I switch the HD of Explorer comes back. My event log says: 'An error was detected on device \...\DR11 during a paging operation'.
Fwiw: the led blinks and the hd purs normally. However no access.

I could try to connect it through Sata, but I have no external port available and I do not know if I can just plug it in directly on the motherboard (while using its own power).

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No More

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Theo

ASKER

Thank you.
The disk does not show up in Disk Management.
I am hesitant as to pulling the drive out. My suggestion of connecting esata directly to the MB was wrong?

No More

Can you post link to your hard disk specification ?

Theo

ASKER

I have it out now and going to connect it. Will report.

Theo

ASKER

Well the bios sees the drive, but I get the message SMART is bad. In Disk management it is seen and reported as healthy and empty. It is however not empty. Can you recommend any recovery software?

No More

Oh dear, Well you could try recover partition with this
http://www.aomeitech.com/pa/standard.html

After installation, there is Partition Recovery Wizard select affected drive and choose FULL scan

Theo

ASKER

I tried Partition Recovery, but after two hours I stopped the Full Scan since it was still at 0%

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David

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nobus

probably th disk is not even running
do you have any lights or indicators on it? check them
also if you connect the drive to another usb 3 port - do you have a notification sound?

Theo

ASKER

Yes, the disk is running. I could assign a drive letter to the 'empty' icon. It was E and I told it to take L. E is still there, unchanged, but L is a new partition that is supposed to have a size of 500 MegaByte (on a disk of 500 Gigabyte). Only 100 MB would be free on that partition, but it shows no files.

I am not sure if I can afford it, but you have any recommendation for clean rooms with bunny people I could send it to?

David

Showing no files is textbook indication that you aren't seeing a disk at all, and your USB bridge chip is just creating a broken drive because the chip is too stupid to handle failures properly.

Many major cities have data recovery firms. Try a search engine. If you are in the DFW area, I strongly recommend http://24hourdata.com You can literally drop a disk off any time as they are open 24x7x365 nand get a free estimate. I have no first-hand experience with firms outside of the Dallas Fort Worth area.

nobus

a company with a good reputation and a fair price is Gillware http://www.gillware.com/
ask for their recovery price settings

note that Lacie was known to have a couple of disks in an enclosure,, in some raid config on older models - but i don't know if that still applies here

Theo

ASKER

I quit. Maybe I will send the disk to a recovery service, but for the moment I am not going to spend more time or money on this an accept my loss. I have replaced the hd in de Quadra and it runs allright. Thanks very much for the useful tips to discover this.